Bridging academia, practice, and entrepreneurship, Dr. Mariela Alfonzo is a scholar-practitioner with 25+ years’ experience in the nexus of urban design, behavior, and the quadruple-bottom line. Her work quantifies how the built environment influences feelings, perceptions, and choices, and how that translates into economic, social, health, and environmental outcomes.
She is the Founder and CEO of State of Place, a software company that uses AI and proprietary hardware to extract data on 150+ street-level built environment features and generate predictive models linking urban design to quality-of-life outcomes. The software recommends what and where to invest to optimize those outcomes (e.g., real estate value, chronic diseases, climate-related performance, transportation modes and safety, etc.) and lets users test scenarios and forecast their benefits to facilitate approvals, funding, and buy-in. State of Place has worked with 50+ cities and developers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
Dr. Alfonzo is an Urban Land Institute 40 Under 40, a New Cities Foundation Placemaking Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, and recipient of the Dale Prize in AI in Urban Planning. She is a Research Professor at NYU Tandon with a PhD and MURP from UC Irvine and a BA in Psychology and Architecture from University of Miami.
Bridging academia, practice, and entrepreneurship, Dr. Mariela Alfonzo is a scholar-practitioner with 25+ years’ experience in the nexus of urban design, behavior, and the quadruple-bottom line. Her work quantifies how the built environment influences feelings, perceptions, and choices, and how that translates into economic, social, health, and environmental outcomes.
She is the Founder and CEO of State of Place, a software company that uses AI and proprietary hardware to extract data on 150+ street-level built environment features and generate predictive models linking urban design to quality-of-life outcomes. The software recommends what and where to invest to optimize those outcomes (e.g., real estate value, chronic diseases, climate-related performance, transportation modes and safety, etc.) and lets users test scenarios and forecast their benefits to facilitate approvals, funding, and buy-in. State of Place has worked with 50+ cities and developers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
Dr. Alfonzo is an Urban Land Institute 40 Under 40, a New Cities Foundation Placemaking Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, and recipient of the Dale Prize in AI in Urban Planning. She is a Research Professor at NYU Tandon with a PhD and MURP from UC Irvine and a BA in Psychology and Architecture from University of Miami.
